Abstract
Abstract. Snow and glacier melt (SGM) estimation plays an important role in water resources management. Although melting process can be modelled by energy balance methods, such studies require detailed data, which is rarely available. Hence, new and simpler approaches are needed for SGM estimations. The present study aims at developing an artificial neural networks (ANN) based technique for estimating the energy available for melt (EAM) and SGM rates using available and easy to obtain data such as temperature, short-wave radiation and relative humidity. Several ANN and multiple linear regression models (MLR) were developed to represent the energy fluxes and estimate the EAM. The models were trained using measured data from the Zongo glacier located in the outer tropics and validated against measured data from the Antizana glacier located in the inner tropics. It was found that ANN models provide a better generalisation when applied to other data sets. The performance of the models was improved by including Antizana data into the training set, as it was proved to provide better results than other techniques like the use of a prior logarithmic transformation. The final model was validated against measured data from the Alpine glaciers Argentière and Saint-Sorlin. Then, the models were applied for the estimation of SGM at Condoriri glacier. The estimated SGM was compared with SGM estimated by an enhanced temperature method and proved to have the same behaviour considering temperature sensibility. Moreover, the ANN models have the advantage of direct application, while the temperature method requires calibration of empirical coefficients.
Highlights
Glaciers could be considered as the most important water reservoirs, since they represent about 68% of the total fresh water available (Shiklomanov and Roda, 2003)
The present study developed different artificial neural networks (ANN) models able to represent the nonlinear relations between common meteorological parameters, e.g. temperature, short-wave radiation or relative humidity, and other energy fluxes and the energy balance for a given time
The present study focused on daytime hours, defined as the ones when incoming short-wave radiation (ISWR) is higher than 20 W m−2 (Hu et al, 2012)
Summary
Glaciers could be considered as the most important water reservoirs, since they represent about 68% of the total fresh water available (Shiklomanov and Roda, 2003). Previous studies state that snow and glacier melt (SGM) is of fundamental importance for the present and future water scenarios in snow-fed and glacier-fed basins (Kure et al, 2012a; Jansson et al, 2003), but most of them are located in the poles far from human activities; only mountainous glaciers are located in human populated continental areas. Mountainous glaciers could be considered the world’s virtual water towers assuring year round water flow for the main rivers, and its melting may lead to water shortage for millions of people. Most of the mountain glaciers are melting quite rapidly, a fact that may lead to serious social tensions related to water. It is important to understand glacier dynamics in order to analyse possible future water scenarios. Different measures to prevent melting like covers, water injection or snow compaction were tested at field
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